Announcing the KUKA Robotics Challenge!

Today, we’re excited to announce a new challenge developed in collaboration with two valuable partners of our Robotics Software Engineer Nanodegree program—KUKA, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). It’s the KUKA Robotics Challenge, and you are invited to enter the challenge today!

The Prize

The winner of the KUKA Robotics Challenge will win a one-week, all-expenses paid trip to visit the new KUKA Udacity Learning Lab at KIT—a truly one-of-a-kind opportunity. Torsten Kroeger, Professor of Engineering and Head of the Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics at KIT, spoke to us about what the winner can expect:

“We’re delighted to take the winner of the challenge through our multiple robotics research labs at KIT; including industrial robotics, medical robotics, humanoid robotics, and service robotics. In addition, we have select research lab tours for manufacturing and logistics, depending on what the winner is most interested in seeing. You’re going to get an opportunity to tour our campus and see the actual robots that were used in the challenge.”

The winner will also get to attend NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference in Munich. NVIDIA is another valued Udacity partner, and this conference is one the highest-profile events in the world, focusing on artificial intelligence and its applications across many important fields. Attending the conference will be an incredible opportunity to network, and explore the latest breakthroughs in autonomous vehicles, high performance computing, healthcare, big data, and more.

The Challenge

Participants in the challenge will compete in a race to navigate a real KUKA iiwa robot, equipped with a Schunk gripper and Roboception camera, through a physical 2D maze. Your code will search for a path, and navigate the robot through the maze by commanding 2D positions and an orientation angle to get around corners in the fastest time possible. The clock starts when the robot picks up the object and your code begins to run. The clock stops when the robot successfully moves the object to the end location in the maze.

How to enter the challenge

To be eligible to enter the KUKA Robotics Challenge, the minimum requirement is that you are a graduate of, or actively enrolled in, Term 1 of the Robotics Software Engineer Nanodegree Program. You must also be a U.S. resident to participate in the challenge and claim the prize. You will have from August 25th to August 28th to submit your project in your Robotics Software Engineer Nanodegree program classroom. KIT will run all participants’ project submissions and announce the winner on September 1st.

Running code on real hardware

The opportunity to test code on real hardware is one of the most unique features of the Robotics Software Engineer Nanodegree program, and it is our partnership with KUKA and KIT that makes it all possible. Students are able to write code, test their code in simulation, then watch as their code is deployed to a real industrial robot, in a real lab, via video feed. The challenge is a natural extension of our partnership with these two robotics innovators, and it represents a special opportunity to go behind-the-scenes and learn about some of the most exciting advances in the field.

Our partners

KUKA is a leading global supplier of intelligent automation solutions, and offers its customers in the automotive, electronics, consumer goods, metalworking, logistics/e-commerce, healthcare, and service robotics industries everything they need from a single source: from components and cells to fully automated systems. The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has one of the world’s largest research and teaching facilities, with more than 9,000 employees and an annual budget of just under € 1 billion. KIT occupies a leading position across many fields of research. KIT is launching the KUKA Udacity Robot Learning Lab to collaborate with students around the globe on complex scientific and technical issues in the field of robotics.

Your future in robotics

You can get full details on the KUKA Robotics Challenge here. For students already enrolled in our Robotics Software Engineer Nanodegree program, this could be the opportunity of a lifetime! And if you’re not yet enrolled in the program? This could be the perfect time to commit to an amazing future in robotics!

David Silver

David Silver leads the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree Program. Before Udacity, David was a research engineer on the autonomous vehicle team at Ford. He has an MBA from Stanford, and a BSE in computer science from Princeton.